The Cineman ::: Redux

William Wyler’s ‘The Letter’ seems duly noted for its early work by Bette Davis (who struck earlier fame in another Somerset Maugham piece, ‘Of Human Bondage’) as well as its superb opening sequence. And for those two reasons, as well as the director’s delicious noir techniques, there isn’t much going for this substandard studio suspense. Maugham’s writing is terribly sanitized due to Production Code standards, which is something that could not be avoided, yet leaves the audiences wishing for more thrilling circumstances than those presented. ‘Letter’ starts off with a seemingly cold-blooded murder committed by Leslie Crosbie (Davis) in exotic British Malaya, as a gripping tracking shot unveils everything from the clouds enshrouding the moon to a tree dripping acacia, until a gunshot frightens a cockatoo out of the frame. Leslie, who is married to the wealthy rubber magnate Robert (Herbert Marshall), claims that the man she shot tried to rape her, and her actions are considered heroic by all. But a letter appears, in possession of the wife of the deceased, proving her a killer. Defense attorney Howard Joyce (James Stephenson), stuck in a dramatic position, must either get the truth, or buy the letter back in order to save Leslie’s head.

Bette Davis’ eyes say so much for the screen, and in ‘The Letter’, they’re the only things that really perform in the final cut. Davis’ role is cut-and-run, rushed to the point of recognizing her true acting worth as seen in later work such as ‘All Above Eve’ and ‘…Baby Jane?’ While her dramatic chops seem undercut, much of this could be explained through her on-set disagreements with Wyler – as they were romancing offstage. James Stephenson’s work is strong, as his uncertainty of Leslie’s innocence destructures gender barriers in 1940s cinema. His own sin of buying back the evidential letter touches on his male guilt (”Be flippant about your own crimes if you want to, but don’t be flippant about mine!”) Wyler’s composition and dramatic flourish are omnipresent, from the meeting of the dead man’s Eurasian wife (Gale Sondergaard) to the strangely unnecessary Breen-era final scene. Although cloaked by Max Steiner’s sultry score, ‘The Letter’ is only half as tantalizing as it was in 1940.

[***]

Tarantino’s ‘Inglourious Basterds‘ represents his strongest (and most accessible) work since ‘Jackie Brown‘, which for some detractors of the director/writer, would be hard to surmise. Over the course of two-and-a-half hours, the audience is treated to a absurd blend of materials, ranging from the spaghetti western to WWII revisionist history to the finest in action-comedies. Regardless of QT’s hyperactive eye, each scene is devoted entirely to its characters, letting them twist the audience into a manic suspense through winded dialogues and postmodernist confrontations. To put briefly, a group of rebel Jewish-American soldiers known as the Basterds, headed by the deterministic Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), throw themselves into Nazi-occupied France to kill and scalp as many Nazis as possible. Their plan – wayward but visceral. Their enemies’ plan? To get sleuthy SS Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) to track them down and remove of them so the Third Reich can get on its way. But a young Jewish-French woman Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent) who had escaped from Landa’s clutches in the past, is ordered to make her small cinema the new premiere location for a Nazi propaganda film which all officials – including Der Fuhrer – will be attendance. As British general Ed Fench (Mike Myers) says, “All our rotten eggs are in one basket. The plan is: blow up the basket.”

Pitt commands his scenes with a wooden-jawed, Southern-drawl presence that never gets old. His lines are as sharp as his antagonist Waltz’s – who shines in one of his first American blockbusters as a two-timing xenophobe weasel. Laurent’s performance serves Tarantino’s venture into the theme of identity very well – as the theme tends to permeate the entire film – as her stunted romance with Nazi war hero Zoller (Daniel Bruhl) ends on an ironic note. And as with any QT film, his aestheticization of violence is omnipresent. Scalping and assassinations happen periodically, and the final blowout will probably leave many viewers speechless for a few minutes. Also, David Bowie couldn’t be better utilized for a sequence than here. In the end, this is not a movie about history – this is his story – Tarantino’s alone. But it remains a glamorous, indulgent epic that could only happen when a filmmaker wants to break all the rules. Putting behind ‘Pulp Fiction’s shoddy indie cred and the numbed-out ‘Reservoir Dogs‘, Tarantino has presented us the closest thing to his masterpiece.

[****]

To compare writer-director Sophie Barthes’ ‘Cold Souls‘ to the filmography of Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich; Synecdoche, New York) is foul play. While Kaufman’s films spiral into meta-discussion, they retain a certain introverted nature notably of that director. Barthes’ film is far from such; it maintains a warmth for its characters, and a cold corporatist-era eye on its concept. The talented Paul Giamatti – always one for character acting – plays himself as a creativity-clotted version of himself, desperately trying to perform the titular character in Chekhov’s ‘Uncle Vanya’ in New York. Feeling lost in the role and lethargic towards life, Paul discovers a company which extracts souls from humans, and stores them. Ridiculous, yes, but the audience will rather enjoy themselves through Barthes’ matter-of-factly approach to the concept. No science lessons needed, even as the experiment surgeon Dr. Flintstein (David Straitharn) explains himself: they have no idea what the soul is made up of, how it works, or anything. The mechanics are left to the viewer’s imagination – or perhaps chagrin.

Special note should be taken to the character of Nina. Played stoicly by Russian actress Dina Korzun, Nina is a soul trafficker – a mule, who assumes the soul of someone else while travelling back to Russia to have it put on the black market. Yet for every soul she takes under her sleeve, a small residue is left in her body, making Nina a woman of several unassuming lives. Her job leaves her eradicated of her own self-worth, as she scrambles through the dreams and nightmares of those she has sacrificed over a coach seat across the Atlantic. Paired with Giamatti’s equally forfeited performance, Dorzun lends an emotional quandary to Barthes’ film, emphasized by its focus-racking final shot. ‘Souls’ is a trip through the mind without being trippy; it is a mundane questioning of our role in humanity without being pretentious.

[ *** ]

I get it, I get it. It’s a movie based on a cartoon based on toy soldiers. It’s not supposed to be serious, right? But when you secure a budget of $170 million from a major studio, you’d expect a little class. ‘G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra’ is a two-hour-long Bazooka Joe comic strip. The good guys – The Joes – wage battle against a group of international evil-mongers working under the faction name Cobra. And while attempts to assure audiences that the film falls into place with our cultural zeitgeist (comic books meet post-9/11), there’s no real status quo being evoked. An elaborate scene involving the toppling of the Eiffel Tower does lend itself to the intended gravitas (Cobra is bad!) but the screenplay is so scattershot and infantile that a PG-13 rating seems out of place. 13-year-olds are a little more cultured than the explosions that modern directors serve up, but a true origin story is fatally missing. Stephen Sommers of ‘The Mummy’ and the wretched ‘Van Helsing’ fame seems so stuck to storyboarding the action sequences that there’s no room for any witty one-liners that go beyond catchphrases from the cartoon series. And while the action can be exhilirating, ranging from body suits that accelerate human reflexes to ninja sword-fighting, one only wishes there was a relevant story to pick up the pieces.

Duke (Channing Tatum) and Ripcord (Marlon Wayans) are two of the Army’s best, and during a dangerous mission to export a set of highly-volatile nanotech weapons, they are impeded by a leather-clad femme fatale named the Baroness (Sienna Miller), who Duke dated and dumped at the altar. But when General Hawk (Dennis Quaid) wants to use Duke’s insider information to learn more about the sabotage, he invites them to join G.I.Joe, an elite collective of international operatives who fight the bad guys – who happen to be the weapon maker McCullen (Chris Eccleston) and the deformed Cobra Commander (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). And besides a few tiny subplots, that’s the extent of G.I.Joe’s story. Tatum looks bored, Wayans looks abused, Quaid looks lazy, Miller looks attractive, and Eccleston is underused. The only actor that deserves recognition is Gordon-Levitt, who takes on the silliness with great zeal, powering himself through his vocal talents to pay tribute to the greats of cartoon villainry, like Dick Dastardly and the Penguin. I’d figure he’s the only guy who actually cares about his script. Character development is nil, while dialogue is sparse and usually suffocated through the action. However, its design is gleaming and well-crafted, and is primary evidence on where all those millions of dollars went. Also, why does the US President have a British accent? I thought Hollywood learned their lesson after Sean Connery played a Russian captain like an IRA agent. ‘G.I. Joe’ has a body by Fisher, and brains by Hasbro.

[**]

A lone samurai, without a job or master, trods down the beaten path through a town where the dust blows in the very audible wind. The constable is more of a clown than a cop, clacking wooden planks to signal an oncoming gang war. And a dog skips down the street not with a bone – but a human hand – clenched in his jaws. All of these exist in Akira Kurosawa’s ‘Yojimbo’, a film that for 1961 seems to be juggling many traits of the common American western picture. That was precisely the director’s aim, and in most critical circles, he got it down pat. Toshiro Mifune’s archetypical performance as Sanjuro is essential to Kurosawa’s vision, whose gallows humor and absurdist tendencies lend themselves very well to the film’s over-arching attitude. In a small town, two merchants have started a bloodthirsty rivalry, where townspeople are slowly bought into a gang force and devalue their lives. The town restauranteur Hansuke – a neutral figure who sides with Sanjuro – comments that there’s no other life to live than a gambler. Kurosawa’s influences of John Ford and Dashiell Hammett are quite apparent through technical means, but his thematic approach seems clairvoyantly anti-corporate. From two businessmen dividing a town with the obvious intent to profit on the violence (the coffin maker’s role especially employed for humorous intent) to the evident poverty of the brave samurai, the Japanese filmmaker invokes subtle commentary on class structures, even for a jidaigeki piece like ‘Yojimbo’.

The director’s mark is on everything excluding Mifune. The production design is highly ornate, but appears casual once it gets caught up in the suspense. From the wide streets created with the aim of using a telephoto lens, it’s no wonder Kurosawa’s standoffs paved the way for Leone’s own experimentation of Americana. While the fight choreography is breathtaking, it never overshadows the director’s or cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa’s eye for claustrophobic conflict. For lack of a better example, imagine John Woo on valium. Simple eye-level shots, framing within doorways and streets, and tremendous lighting work all give way to a more exciting approach to what may normally be a walk-in-the-park action film. And when the ambitious young Unosuke (Tatsuya Nakadai) returns from his trips abroad, he returns with a gift to the audience – a loaded pistol, which shakes the dust underneath Sanjuro’s samurai feet. It is a clash of generations, a study of great direction and period detail, and the most Western work Kurosawa produced in his career.

[****]